The Kingdom of Matthias describes the lives of members of a religious cult in the early 1800s. Most of the cult’s participants end up ruining their lives, but one member, a formerly enslaved Black woman named Isabella Van Wagenen, emerges unscathed. The cult ultimately devolves into an environment filled with violence, sexual scandals, fear-based obedience, and murder. When the cult’s activities are exposed and there’s a public outcry, two white cult members (Ann and Benjamin Folger) try to blame Isabella for the cult’s terrible activities. The public buys the Folgers story, quickly labeling Isabella as an evil Black woman. Isabella, however, is resilient in the face of this reputational onslaught. She works with editor Gabriel Vale to publish a book revealing the truth about what happened, successfully sues the Folgers for slander, and eventually starts a new life as the now-famous anti-slavery activist Sojourner Truth. Isabella’s story shows how American society often undermines and vilifies Black women, but also captures how Black women often prove themselves to be resilient and powerful figures despite the prejudices and hardships they face.
Isabella Van Wagenen’s life exposes the persistent injustices and prejudices that Black women experience in 19th-century American society. As a teenage slave, Isabella is separated from her parents and forced to bear children against her will. Her children, too, are all taken away from her. After Isabella manages to emancipate herself, she works long, laborious hours as a servant—even as a free woman she, and other people of color in American society, have little recourse but to live a life of labor and toil. Even her time in the cult is marked by exhausting physical labor: cult leader Matthews often scolds Isabella for other people’s errors, and he continually demands that she work harder to compensate for others (like his lover Ann) who don’t do their share of housework. Matthews exploits Isabella, as a Black woman, more than the other cult members, who are all white. When the cult eventually causes a public scandal that spirals into a criminal court case, leading cult members Benjamin and Ann Folger attempt to blame Isabella, saying that she manipulated them into submission and even masterminded a murder. Their accusations highlight how Black women are often targeted as scapegoats, and the fact that the public blindly believes that Isabella was a cult mastermind even though she was far less powerful in the cult than the Folgers were illustrates the ways that racism can overwhelm logic or common sense in American society.
Despite Isabella’s abject oppression, she emerges as the story’s most resilient, empowered, and successful character. Isabella’s story captures many of the ways that Black women are frequently undermined and villainized in American society, but also how those Black women are stronger, smarter, tougher, and more admirable than people give them credit for. Isabella successfully emancipates herself from a life of slavery and, when the Folgers accuse Isabella of masterminding the cult and murdering Elijah, she successfully sues them for slander, clears her name by publishing the truth about the Folgers’ involvement in the cult, and uses her compensation from the trial to start a new life as the activist and public speaker Sojourner Truth. More broadly, through Isabella’s story, the book shows the ways that American society tends to undermine and undervalue Black women like Isabella/Sojourner, and yet how those same women regularly prove themselves to be profoundly resilient and powerful figures.
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Race, Prejudice, and Resilience Quotes in Kingdom of Matthias
But with Ann’s ascendance in Matthias’s affections, [Isabella Van Wagenen] coupled her faith with her own notions of what was going on, notions that had to do less with divine patriarchy than with devilish lust.
The bulk of the Kingdom’s household drudge work now fell on Isabella Van Wagenen, who was especially peeved that Mother and Father rose late in the day, which threw her back in her chores.
As life in the cult (or, as the cult members call it, the “Kingdom”) falls into a rhythm, it becomes clear that Isabella Van Wagenen—a Black woman who functions as the cult’s household servant—bears the brunt of the domestic labor. Other cult members, like Matthias (who informally refers to himself as “Father”) and Ann (who starts going by “Mother” after she begins a relationship with Matthias) barely do any work at all. They sleep all day and keep shifting more work onto Isabella’s shoulders. The cult is a patriarchal environment, and Isabella’s plight exposes how such environments tend to marginalize and oppress people who are undervalued. The cult’s most powerful white man (Matthias) and white woman (Ann) effectively exploit the only Black woman (Isabella Van Wagenen). Matthias organizes the cult to recreate the “traditional” way of life he experienced as a child in a rural community run exclusively by father-figures (patriarchs). Many situations that unfold in the cult thus symbolize dysfunctional aspects of patriarchal societies. Here, Isabella’s frustrations show that such environments tend to disenfranchise, marginalize, and exploit women of color the most. Isabella’s plight thus serves as a subtle commentary on the racism and sexism in “traditional” American society.
On July 28, Matthias, Elijah Pierson, Ann Folger, and Catherine Galloway sat down to supper. At the end of the meal the Prophet spooned out plates of blackberries that he and Pierson had picked that day. Ann Folger ate only two berries. Catherine finished her plate, and Elijah wolfed his down and had another. Matthias had none at all. […] About four o’clock the next afternoon, Elijah […] suddenly collapsed. […] Matthias forbade any doctors or medicine to aid Elijah, and Elijah agreed: prayer and prayer alone could relieve his affliction. […] In the morning, Ann Folger told the waking disciples that Pierson was dead.
Privately, [Benjamin Folger] instigated a rumor that Isabella [Van Wagenen] had tried to poison him and his family on the morning when she served up the undrinkable coffee. […] On Western’s advice, she initiated proceedings against Folger for slander, and gathered up signed testimonials attesting to her trustworthiness from several of her former masters and employers.
I have got the truth and I know it, and I will crush them with the truth.
Isabella confirmed all of [Vale’s] hunches about the Kingdom’s sexual arrangements, and much more besides. […] He was well aware that the black servant Isabella’s word, on its own, would not stand up against the Folgers’, given public prejudices. And so whenever possible, he supplemented her narrative with “white evidence” from his interviews and from the public record.
And so the world would come to know her as the ex-slave Sojourner Truth.
